ICE audits its detention centers, but too infrequently too keep anyone in check and doesn’t follow up to make sure changes are made, a government report issued last month disclosed. The agency has very little capacity to make sure that its sprawling network of over 200 immigration prisons meets the government’s own standards. Worse, glaring deficiencies go uncorrected, sometimes deliberately, because ICE’s oversight system is hobbled by lack of funding and under-attention. The DHS Inspector General’s document, issued June 26, reads like an ICE abolitionist’s talking points. Inspections are [...]
Resisting family separation and family detention in South Texas
President Donald Trump’s policy of separating migrant families is quickly morphing into the expansion of an existing policy of detaining families. At the end of June, the federal government announced that an immigration prison—the Port Isabel Service Processing Center—would be its “primary family reunification and removal center,” though it has since walked that policy back. We work out of this facility and have visited it many times. Call it what they like, this is a prison. That Port Isabel is at the center of the administration’s new policy to expand family detention only underscores [...]
Family Separation and Reunification
By Anita Ortiz Maddali There has been widespread public outcry following the administration’s “Zero Tolerance” policy, which called for criminal prosecution of parents crossing the border without proper documentation and forced separation from their children. The President recently issued an Executive Order ending the separation policy. Now, parents will be detained with their children. But what about the 2000 plus children who have already been separated because of the zero tolerance policy? How will they be reunited with their parents? Initially, and, understandably, from an [...]
From family detention to family separation
Separating families, as a Trump administration policy now requires when migrants try to sneak into the United States, is certainly cruel. Forgotten in the ruckus dominating immigration debates since last month’s policy announcement is the Obama administration’s embrace of an equally troubling alternative: locking up migrant children alongside their mothers. Losing sight of common threads between family separation and family detention runs the risk of missing an opportunity to reimagine immigration policies. In early May, Trump’s Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced that federal [...]
Trump’s family separation & detention executive order
Responding to the outcry over his administration’s policy of separating migrant families, President Trump signed an executive order today ostensibly limiting separation while simultaneously expanding family detention. The executive order explicitly links the alternative nightmares of family separation and detention. The executive order purports to end the family separation policy. Indeed, it claims that the administration’s policy is to “maintain family unity, including by detaining families.” To do that, the president ordered DHS to “maintain custody of alien families during the pendency [...]
The School to Deportation Pipeline
By Laila L. Hlass Last month, Education Secretary Betsy DeVos told Congress that local schools should have the freedom to decide whether to report undocumented students to immigration authorities. Although she has since stepped back her remarks, this sentiment is in line with President Trump’s pervasive attacks on immigrants. Trump has called immigrants rapists, gang members, and “animals.” Regarding migrant children, he said “they look so innocent. They’re not innocent.” Like DeVos, Trump’s high-ranking appointees have sounded much the same theme: Attorney General Sessions called [...]
The Perversity of External Immigration Enforcement
Alexander Sager On March 25, 2018, Palm Sunday, the Viacrucis del Migrante [The Migrants’ Way of the Cross] set out from Tapachula, Chiapas toward Tijuana. The approximately 1,000 Central American migrants traveled together for safety, as well as to draw attention to Mexican and U.S. policies that undermine the right to asylum. The 2018 Caravan drew significantly more attention than had previous years’ efforts. Sadly, much of the attention was from the Trump administration and right-wing media. President Trump (predictably) voiced his ire through a tweet: “Mexico is doing very little, if [...]
Immigration crime cases fill federal courts in 2017
Immigration crime has become a common feature of federal court dockets across the United States. I previously wrote that in fiscal year 2016 there were 68,314 defendants prosecuted for federal immigration crimes (see similar accounts of 2012 and 2010). Approximately 10,000 fewer defendants had their cases disposed of in the 2017 fiscal year, which might explain a small drop in immigration-related imprisonment, but the overall trend as similar. In the fiscal year that began under President Obama and ended under President Trump, there were more defendants prosecuted for immigration crimes before [...]
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